Modern electronics, such as telecommunications equipment, are commonly contained in a housing or chassis. The chassis may serve many functions, including providing structural support for the contents, providing a common electrical ground, providing protection from electromagnetic interference (EMI), and others. For many applications (e.g., telecommunications centers, server farms, etc.) it has become common practice to stack multiple individual electronics chassis in specialized racks. Further, multiple racks may be arranged in a side-by-side manner. These arrangements allow for reducing the space required to house a large number of such electronics enclosures.
Within certain industries, there are standards organizations that have promulgated specifications for certain types of electronics chassis. One example of such an organization is the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) and an example of such a specification is PICMG 3.0 Rev. 2.0 or as further updated, and more commonly known, the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) specification. The ATCA defines specifications for a standards-based telecommunications computing platform. It was developed by a cross-section of over 100 industry suppliers and telecom equipment manufacturers.
The ATCA defines an open switch fabric based platform delivering an industry standard in performance, fault tolerance, as well as a scalable solution for telecommunications and data center equipment. The base specification defines the physical and electrical characteristics of an off-the-shelf, modular chassis based on switch fabric connections between hot swappable blades. The ATCA base specification defines the boards form factors, core backplane fabric connectivity, power, management interfaces, and the electromechanical specifications of the boards. The electromechanical specification enables equipment from different vendors to be incorporated in a modular fashion while being guaranteed to operate.
Although the ATCA has provided a significant improvement with respect to providing standardized telecom and computer component interfaces and operability, several of the design specifications have failed to account for the growth in the processing speed and density of electronics board. For instance, the 200 W power dissipation per slot permitted by the specification places a restriction on how much heat can be generated by a board, while not defining the location of the heat sources. To meet ever-increasing bandwidth demands, processing speeds have increased faster than anticipated by the ATCA. Accordingly, as there is a direct relationship between speed and power consumption—the faster the processor speed, the higher the power consumption of the processor—a greater amount of heat must be dissipated by an ATCA chassis including boards having processors with faster processing speeds. In view of the rigid board form factors defined by the ATCA base specification, this leads to problems in achieving sufficient cooling for high-speed and high-power components such as processors, since the majority of the 200 W will be consumed by those components. Further, due to operation at the edge of current cooling capacity, even partial failure of the cooling system (e.g., one or more fans) may result in damaged components or undesired system shut down.
It is against this background that the present invention has been developed.